Mordechai Rabello was born in 1940 in Bologna, Italy. His family fled from the Fascist regime in Italy and managed to reach Switzerland, spending the war years in refugee detention camps. After the war the family returned to Italy. In 1964 Rabello completed his law studies at Bologna University and in 1965 he immigrated to Israel, where he began to study for a master’s degree in law at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He continued to doctorate studies at the Faculty and in 1972, after receiving his doctorate, he began to teach at the Faculty.
Rabello’s fields of expertise are Roman law, family law, the law of obligations, the codification of Roman law, Jewish law, private law, and constitutional law. In 2007 Italian President Giorgio Napolitano awarded Rabello the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity.